The Galactic Mage (12 page)

He cleared his head with a violent shake, stomping his foot and willing the thoughts away with a grunt that rattled in his throat. What the hell was he thinking? It was just a mouse. A mouse! Vermin. And he’d made progress with it too. That was the point of sending a surrogate after all. Wasn’t it? To discover and to learn. So the lesson was there. Now it was time for the next step.

He cursed the weakness from his mind, forced reason slowly, thankfully, back to bear as he drove the absurd imagery away. He mumbled inside his head for stability. What did he know? What did he know? He knew now that he could teleport things to the moon without the Liquefying Stone. That was one. And he knew he needed work on the Winter Warding spell too. That was another thing. See? Some good had come from the cast in that. He just needed to focus back to calm. That, and he needed answers for the rest of what went wrong.

After a few moments, he was himself again, free from unproductive emotions like guilt and insecurity. He took a deep breath and began the cast that would bring the mouse’s body back. Once it had returned, Altin wrapped it in a cloth and called to Taot for a ride. It was time to go to town.

Chapter
12

N
o crew members were seriously injured by the impacts of the Hostile projectiles, and the ensuing hours that Orli spent at her battle stations post, in sick bay assisting the triage nurses in the infirmary, were primarily filled with sitting alongside the other medical staff watching the events outside the ship on the sick bay monitors. As events go, there wasn’t much to see, for the mysterious interstellar orb had made no more passes at the ship after Orli left the bridge. Apparently Roberto’s destruction of what appeared to be one of its only two projectiles had been enough to run it off, at least for now. But a few hours had to pass before anyone really believed that the orb had actually called off the attack.

Called off, but not in retreat, the orb now hovered a few hundred kilometers off the starboard bow. Distress signals had gone out to alert the other ships, and orders were given to tighten the formation—the fleet having spread itself as they traveled to increase the chance of detecting Hostiles along the way. Obviously that strategy had worked, albeit a bit better than they had hoped, and the fleet was rushing to close ranks and come to the
Aspect’s
aid. It was clear that one-on-one was not the way to face the enemy… ships? Which was the latest debate taking place throughout the fleet, and particularly amongst the
Aspect’s
crew: what exactly was that thing?

Orli sat amongst chattering nurses and her duty officer, Doctor Singh, as the lot of them argued possibilities back and forth excitedly. “It’s a spaceship, all right,” asserted one of the nurses as Orli stared at the image of the orb on a monitor mounted on the wall. “There’s probably some wicked little bastards inside of that thing right now, looking back out at us wondering the same thing. ‘What the hell is that chunk of metal out there?’ they’re saying.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Doctor Singh running long sinuous fingers down the sides of his mouth as if stroking a moustache that was not there. Bright cuticles stood out beneath his nails as he traced the lines of his dark face absently, pulling his lips into a scowl for a moment before thumb and forefinger parted and followed the lines of his smooth shaven jaw. “It might be a ship,” he said, “but I’m thinking it might be something else instead. An organism. An animal of some kind. Like a space mollusk or something similar to a tortoise or a snail.”

“In space? Are you serious? It’s too cold. And there’s nothing to eat,” argued the nurse.

“Maybe it replenishes its energy from nearby suns. We do. Why not it?”

“That doesn’t mean it’s alive.”

“True,” Doctor Singh agreed. But Orli could tell that he was not convinced. The idea of a creature living independently out in space did seem rather absurd. But nothing was impossible she supposed.

A downgrade in alert status was ordered shortly after the fourth hour of the orb’s withdrawal. Level Orange was announced and, despite being endlessly on edge and prepared to return to her station in sick bay at any moment, Orli was compelled to go back to her normal post in her lab and nursery.

Once there she was far too anxious to work, and she spent more time simply staring at the lab monitor watching the orb hover out in space, waiting. But waiting for what? She wondered if maybe it was hurt, too tired to move and suffering from the loss of its long mineral shaft. Maybe it was like a bee, she thought. Maybe having lost its stinger, it was doomed to die. She began to think Doctor Singh might have a point. She made a mental note to mention her bee theory to him the next time she was in sick bay, which she hoped would not be for a long, long time.

In the meantime, she needed a distraction. Staring into the monitor at an unmoving object with no defining features beyond roundness and drab brownish gray coloring was enough to drive a person insane. Sometimes she felt she was close enough to losing her mind already, so, to distract herself, she decided to have another look at her little fungal spore—the one with three types of DNA, the discovery of which had brought her to the bridge at the same inconvenient moment that the orb had decided to attack.

She’d been puzzling over the complicated DNA sequence for a day or two prior to her incident on the bridge. At first it just seemed odd, an expectedly unexpected alien kind of thing. But as she studied it closely and scoured every record she could find for something that would shed some light on the oddity that she’d found, she realized that her fungal DNA had three consecutive strands rather than one long and confounding alien one. That had been the epiphany. The fungus wasn’t defined by one freakishly long strand, but three separate ones, three that were totally shuffled up and assembled seemingly at random in a single strand. That’s what, in the end, she’d finally figured out. Which led her to discover further that her fungus was essentially three species and not just one as well: it was fungus, bacteria, and virus.

None of the three distinct species, when the strands were reassembled in her computer models anyway, came out exactly like anything found on Earth, but they were similar, much as many other Andalian samples had been. Many of the plants Orli had taken from Andalia had been some exact matches to species from Earth, like the Azaleas had been, but there were many completely new species on Andalia as well. But even amongst the new species, none were so alien and dissimilar that they might not have evolved on Earth at some point given a few different random mutations along the way. The DNA strands in the spore were in keeping with this idea, similar, but not exact. However, the fact that the spore had all three sequences mixed up in one long strand was entirely alien, and there had been nothing else in her samples from Andalia to establish such a precedent. This spore was, in itself, unique from all other species she had seen, whether from Andalia or from Earth.

Granted her Andalian samples were limited in scope, but the concrete evidence from Earth supported the bulk of the Andalian genetic trends as well: things either were what they were, or they were something else, but they were never both, and certainly not a combination of three. Gender switching amphibians and cocoon-morphing insects were about as shifty as anything ever got, and it had been with considerable delight that Orli had chanced upon this discovery and felt it significant enough to bring to the captain’s eye as well. She’d even been foolish enough to think that he would praise her work and maybe, just maybe, even offer a promotion or at least some token of respect. Given that scowl she got as the elevator closed, however, she was fairly certain her news would not impress him in the least. Particularly not now. Not while they were under attack. Not while they were maybe even currently at war with the Hostile race—assuming the orb even turned out to be a Hostile at all.

She shuddered to think of that. What if they were at war? What if she was? And what if that thing wasn’t a Hostile ship, or even a Hostile mollusk like Doctor Singh had said? They were certainly in a war with it now; that was sure. Hell, they could be in two wars now if that thing turned out not to be a Hostile in the end. What a horrible thought. Her whole short adult life had been an unwillingly military one, stuck on this ship and with little choice in the matter. She couldn’t even be on the same ship with her dad because of the stupid fleet protocols. Everything was just military now. Military, military, military. There was no such thing as a civilian anymore. Even those who’d originally signed up as civilians had eventually succumbed and joined the corps. Like Doctor Singh. He was just a doctor when he signed on to go, but in time they told him he was a captain too. He still laughed at that. But eventually he went along. All of them did. Ten years was a long time to buck a trend. And now they were at war in keeping with that trend, going along, almost as if they’d brought it on themselves.

With little else to do, and no longer willing to be mesmerized by the monitor and fear, she shook herself and decided to continue working on the mystery of her single fungal spore. Maybe there was more to find now that she knew that there were three separate things to see. And besides, the captain had much larger concerns for now.

Cursing herself for having thought to seek his praise, she brought her tiny sample out and put it under the microscope again. It still looked like just about every other fungus she’d ever seen. Unique in its own way but, still, a fungus just the same. So where was the evidence of the other parts of its DNA? Where were the other traits? How could two-thirds of this spore’s genetic programming be so entirely masked from microscopic view. She was tempted to hit the damn thing with fungicide just to see what it would do. But she had no second sample and was reluctant to destroy her only source. She realized she had no other choice but to try to grow some in the lab.

Fungi could be tricky things, so she would have to be extra careful with this particular experiment. First of all, such a thing required that her immediate supervisor, Doctor Singh, and Captain Asad both sign off on the project before an alien species replication could begin. Those were fleet regulations. Which were boring and which she abhorred.

However, she had not elected to become a fleet officer on her own, and therefore, in this particular instance, and given the particular nastiness of Captain Asad’s most recent scowl, Orli felt that it was entirely acceptable for her to bypass those protocols, especially because she knew how to grow a fungus properly and how to keep it safe, and because she already knew what the captain was going to say.

Orli was good at what she did, and she knew exactly what to do. She began by clearing out a large cabinet near the far wall, removing all but the middle and lower shelves. She hung a heat lamp inside and put it on a timer set for low light and medium heat. Next she would install a mister in an upper corner, set to spritz twice daily a small dose of water and air, and then she would seal the cabinet doors, airtight and leak-proof. After that, she would build a double-chambered tent by securing successive plastic sheets to the wall, ceiling and around the cabinet on the floor, completely surrounding the cabinet in its own space, sealed tight in the inner tent and enveloped by a perpetual fungicidal cloud in the outer one. She even activated the quarantine misters to spray disinfectant whenever the lab door opened for added security. The little spore had no hope of escape should it try some nasty fungal trick.

But, she was going to let it grow. And at last she had something significant to do.

It took her most of two days to procure the parts and assemble the outer two chambers for her little quarantine to the point she was confident that it was both functional and safe. But at last she was done with it and could place the single Andalian spore into a petri dish and prepare to make it grow. She set it in the confines of the cabinet next to a microscope that she had committed to this task; not even that would escape her airtight tent. The petri dish looked so small sitting there on the wide, waist-high shelf: a single, round plastic container, transparent and filled with a red bed of organic compounds that any fungus should absolutely adore. She hoped she’d done it right, set it up so that the alien spore would grow, but what did she really know about this variety anyway? She really wanted this to work, felt she needed it to. For her own sanity.

Roberto had promised her that cataloguing Andalian plants would get her name into the botanical history books, but she knew that while this was probably true, it would only be as a footnote. Nothing of dignity. She was just the schmuck who happened to be standing in the right place when the landing teams went planet-side. Nothing more. She would get no credit for brains, just for the labor of putting it down for everyone else to read. Anyone could pick a plant, and anyone could put information into a data file. That was not enough for her. Not enough to keep her going for very long. No, this fungus, this was the real work. This was the discovery. Three species in one. She actually had something to be enthusiastic about. And she could hardly wait for it to grow.

But she would have to wait, for shortly after she got the petri dish settled in place, and after a suitable period of time standing in the fungicidal fog and then carefully zipping the outer plastic chamber closed, the alarms went off, recalling the crew to full alert again. She glimpsed over at her monitor, having gotten used to the image of the orb floating out there over the span of a pair of days, and felt her heart begin to pound inside her chest.

Now there were two.

The second one was larger than the first, perhaps by nearly half as much again. And the two were linked together, joined like cells about to split. They must have come together very fast—or else the bridge crew had been very slow to raise an alarm—but they neither split nor merged together all the way after that. They simply joined as they had, and now seemed content to just float out there in space.

Orli felt panic tighten in her stomach as she considered the chance of winning in a fight against them both. Roberto was good, and his instincts had probably saved their lives, but even he could not react fast enough to deal with two. And if they did merge all the way, how huge would a stinger be on a bee as big as that?

She switched the screen to the starboard view, and then to port and stern. Damn. Still no other ships. They were only supposed to be two days apart. Those were the admiral’s orders when the fleet had left from Andalia so many months ago. What was taking them so long? There should be at least one other ship by now, if not two. Meanwhile, the clarion rang and she had to get back to the infirmary before they could accuse her of having dallied twice in as many days. Doctor Singh was a kind man and had acknowledged her tardiness last time with only a frown. But she didn’t want to push him. He was a superior officer after all. She wasn’t sure she could handle any more stress beyond what she already bore.

With one backward glance at her monitor, at the empty space where another ship should be, Orli went out into the corridor, having to pause and wipe the sting out of her eyes as the sterilizing mist she’d set to spray caught her unprepared. “Shit,” she cursed, wiping at her face. She’d forgotten how much that stuff could burn. But she was determined to leave it set that way until she was finished experimenting with the spore.